Wikipedia

Huell Howser

As many Angelenos probably already know, Huell Howser died Sunday night at the age of 67. In memoriam, we thought we'd channel-surf through some episodes of Howser's KCET series California's Gold, which have covered myriad subjects over the course of the beloved reporter's long career -- Howser only retired in November. Among the topics? Secret burger menus, fair food, ostrich omelets and plenty of old guys in the desert. Turn the page. Howser, a Tennessean who came to Southern California in 1981, will be deeply missed.

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Amazon

California cooking icon Marion Cunningham died yesterday at the age of 90 from complications due to Alzheimer's. Famed updater of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, celebrated author, cooking teacher and television host, Cunningham profoundly influenced the cooking habits of Americans.

That is to say, without her guidance -- her cookbooks with recipes reportedly tested on an everyday electric stove, her columns for the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle -- a lot of people in the late 1970s and '80s wouldn't have learned to cook at all.

As is often the case when someone well-known and highly influential dies, the people who knew Cunningham, a lot of them writers, are rushing to share their fondest memories.

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Wikipedia/David Shankbone

Nora Ephron in 2010

Every writer has two or three go-to sources, people who are famous enough for readers to recognize their name, witty enough so they can hold forth on anything and everything, and kind enough to always take your call. Nora Ephron was one of those for me.

Whenever I'd phone, our conversation would always assume the following structure: I'd thank her for making time for me. She'd go, "Pfffffttttttt," like she had nothing better to do. Then I'd ask her questions regarding the subject of whatever story I was writing. Then, just when I was about to hang up and leave her to her day, she'd share a sizzling piece of gossip -- with famous names and everything -- followed by a little bit trash-talking, the glorious kind, the kind that comes out of nowhere and startles you with its blunt incisiveness and makes you laugh out loud.

In between all this -- and they were never long calls, just very action-packed -- she would talk about food: where she'd just eaten, how she preferred to prepare a dish and so on. Anyone who read any of her essay collections -- Scribble, Scribble, Crazy Salad, Wallflower at the Orgy -- knew how interested she was in cooking; Heartburn, her roman a clef about her marriage to Carl Bernstein, was filled with chatty instructions on how to make, say, Lillian Hellman's pot roast or potatoes Anna. She once said that her childhood dream was to be locked up in a bakery.

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